Print Your Own Cards and Stickers with Moo

There used to be a time when you had to take your cherished family photographs to a print shop to get holiday cards printed with the photos. This was expensive and time consuming, and there was always the danger that you'd never see your original photos again. But the Web has made it possible to do this from home. Moo, a site that specializes in do-it-yourself publishing, makes it easy for you to design your cards using your own photos, send in an order, and kick back until your holiday cards arrive in the mail.





Moo accepts media from virtually any online source: uploads from Flickr, Livejournal, Vox, Photobucker, Second Life, Facebook, and more. You can pull images from those services if you like, or upload you own digital photos directly to your Moo account. Once your media is uploaded, choose between a number of products to turn your photos into, design something that fits your specific needs or just suits your taste, and order as much as you like of it.



Moo specializes in custom greeting cards, postcards, minicards, and minicard holders. The service just started offering stickerbooks. You can use the wedding photos you uploaded to Flickr to customize your thank-you cards after the big day, or make stickers out of your favorite Facebook photos of all of your friends. If you don't want to use your own photos, you can use artwork already uploaded to Moo by designers that the site partners with. If you're even lazier and just looking for something quick, you can browse the ready-made section for predesigned stickers, notecards, and postcards designed by professionals. Just add them to your cart, and you're all finished.



The strength of Moo, however, is that you can make your own personalized notecards and sticker books based on the photos you've taken and the artwork you've done. If you know an artist and want to give her a personal holiday gift, upload a scan of one of her paintings to the site and use Moo to create something special from it.

Moo's new stickerbooks start at $10, and greeting cards and postcards start around $24 and $20, respectively. The site also hosts design competitions and contests for its amateur designers and encourages people to post their original designs to the site. While its business started with custom-printed greeting cards, Moo has so much more to offer that it's worth looking around for something new, even if you don't want to use your own media.



The online product designer makes it easy to drag and drop images and designs to make your own unique creations, and the prices are reasonable considering people used to have to spend hundreds to get a run of custom greeting cards. I know a lot of people who use Moo and swear by it. Given that the holidays are coming, you might want to give it a try too; it sure beats the usual store-bought card.